Modular releases the full MAX source

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Modular releases the full MAX source — with the 26.7 release it opened the graph compiler and runtime and the CPU and GPU hardware backends. The kernels, models and serving layer and the Python and Mojo APIs were already Apache 2.0 and stay that way

Why it matters

The key point is that this is the MAX license, not open source — you can use it, modify it and ship commercial products on any hardware with no fees or royalties, but no part of MAX may be used as input to an AI system that reimplements MAX, anyone selling hosted inference or training on MAX must display the Modular Accelerated wordmark prominently, and modified source cannot be distributed except as a fork that sends the changes back to the upstream repository. The Mojo compiler and toolchain were opened first, in August. It is a case of an inference stack moving into a middle ground where the source is visible but reimplementation and redistribution are blocked

Source — Primary sources first; secondary reports are labelled “Press”

Officialmodular.comhttps://www.modular.com/blog/max-license

Added in Week 44, 2026 · See that week

On the map — ⑱ AI Infrastructure Software line

  1. Previous stopStorage for ChatGPT
  2. This recordfull MAX source
  3. Next stopPyTorch 2.15
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Related notes — Notes on the same axis from the same week

As code production sped up, the bottleneck moved

Same week

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Nearby on the same axis

PyTorch 2.15 releasedOfficialScaling Storage for 1 Billion ChatGPT Users (Part I)OfficialResearchers release AInfer-PDPaperModular releases Mojo 1.0, open-sources compiler and tooling under Apache 2.0Official